Maybe you've heard this one:
Pamela Anderson walks into a bookstore.
No, seriously.
A new sitcom—oh-so-slyly titled Stacked—starring the former Baywatch beauty premieres on Fox network this Wednesday. But the show, about an always-picks-the-wrong-guy party girl who wanders into a local store looking for a self-help book and lands a job, will reveal more than Anderson's talents. It will also showcase books from Fox's corporate sibling, HarperCollins.
For the premiere, Jack Welch's Winning gets front-of-store placement. Other HC titles on display at Stacked Books range from Michael Crichton's State of Fear to Edward P. Jones's The Known World. Not seen will be Anderson's own roman à clef, Star, which is published by Atria.
The arrangement between Fox and HC may be the best example to date of book publishers attempting to exploit the promotional value of product placement. Companies ranging from Ford (its Mustang played a prominent role in episodes of American Dreams) to Unilever (TheApprentice built a show around the company's Dove Body Wash) are aggressively using the tactic. Last year, product placement accounted for $3.46 billion worth of promotion, according to the Stamford, Conn., research firm PQ Media. But book publishers have barely begun to dabble in it.
It's still anyone's guess whether Stacked will help move HC books at real bookstores—Fox has so far committed to only six episodes, and it's unclear just how much influence Anderson has over the average book buyer. But the experiment should provide insight into the potential such product placements hold for the book industry.
The Stackedagreement originated with Paul Lance, director of HC's West Coast office, which happens to be located on the Fox lot. Michael Morrison, president of the Harper/Morrow division, explained that the producers needed to fill the bookshelves, so Lance suggested they make it an all-HC bookstore. There's no written contract, just a verbal agreement to keep it in the corporate family.
"They've given me carte blanche to provide them with new titles," said Lance, whose primary job is to find ways for HC to work with other News Corp. companies. "They want it to be a legitimate bookstore." HC isn't paying anything to get its books in front of the camera. All it has to supply are the books—and most of those are damaged copies that can't be sold but look just fine spine-out on a bookshelf. HC's only cost is shipping the books from its Scranton, Pa., warehouse.
It's a good deal for the studio's producers, too. They get to score one for the News Corp. team, while cutting down on the legal hassles of working with multiple publishers. "We have a very large set and we have to fill it with books," said series creator and executive producer Steven Levitan. "One day they showed up with 8,000 books, and to get clearance on all of that would have been a nightmare."
Levitan, who modeled Stacked on his Brentwood neighborhood bookstore, Dutton's, said he always knew he wanted the store to figure prominently in the show. But it wasn't until they began shooting that he decided to set the entire show inside the bookstore, making it an especially ripe marketing opportunity for HC. So far, the books are used only as set decoration, not incorporated into the script. But if the series gets picked up, HC is ready to offer up authors for guest spots. Imagine the plot potential in Pamela Anderson playing host to Judith Regan's latest tell-all writer—say, Jose Canseco.
This isn't entirely new ground for publishers. When Ellen DeGeneres had her ABC series, her character worked in a bookstore and all the books on the set were provided by Hyperion (both companies are owned by Disney). "We are always looking for these opportunities for possible book tie-ins," Hyperion CEO Bob Miller said. Hyperion staffers—including editors and sub-rights managers—check in with their Burbank counterparts regularly to look for such opportunities, Miller said.
Recently, Hyperion and ABC teamed up to write a plot line into the soap One Life to Live in which a character was writing a book. Hyperion enlisted the help of Michael Malone, a novelist and a writer on the show, to pen a real book tied to the show's story line. The Killing Club is now on PW's bestseller list. Miller even appeared with Hyperion editor Gretchen Young on the show, attending a fictional party to launch the real book. Hyperion also commissioned Ridley Pearson to pen a book to coincide with a character's diary in the ABC miniseries of Stephen King's Rose Red back in 2001. The resulting The Diary of Ellen Rimbauer also became a PW bestseller.
"It's not exactly product placement, but it is very exciting," said Miller. "It is a way to compete with other publishers who might not have access."
But over at Viacom-owned Simon & Schuster, publisher David Rosenthal scoffed at HC's arrangement. "Should we be talking with CBS about putting our books in there? I think they have enough to do. It seems like a lot of work. Most of the time, when it happens with our books, it's usually not by our contrivance," he said, in a comment not likely to put to rest speculation that CBS's 60 Minutes gives S&S books special treatment. Rosenthal added, "I don't know how many copies of David McCullough we'll sell on Pamela Anderson's stack."
In other words, it's hard to imagine all that many viewers running out to buy The Known World—the Pulitzer Prize—winning novel about black slaves owners in the South—just because they catch a glimpse of it on Stacked.
Still, considering the vast audience of people who are more likely to tune in to watch Anderson pretend to sell books than browse through a real bookstore, the show holds the potential to greatly increase visibility for HC titles. Fox is clearly targeting the type of viewers who may not gravitate to, say, C-Span's Book TV. Its promotional line for the show reads: "You can't judge a book by its cover—especially when it's only covered by a miniskirt and a baby-tee." It seems the one thing Fox can promise is exposure.
